Created at Kala Art Institute
Berkeley, CA, 2026
Lumen print.
Created at Kala Art Institute
Berkeley, CA, 2026
Lumen print.
Summer Lake, OR
2025
Medium-format.
Berkeley, CA, 2026
ii exhibited at Bathers Library, Cohorts Season One Group Show
Lumen print.
Summer Lake, OR
Medium-format.
Los Angeles, 2021
Portraiture of Asian America.
2. A Mountain and a Forest (right)
2023
Scenes of deforestation.
Yosemite Valley, CA
2023
Yosemite series.
Berkeley, CA
Shi has been awarded residencies by Vermont Studio Center, Prelinger Library, Winslow House Project, PLAYA Summer Lake, Kala Art Institute, and The Ruby, and has received writing scholarships from Off Assignment, Kearny Street Workshop, and Left Margin LIT. Her writing has been nominated for the PEN Dau Prize 2023 and Best New Poets 2025, while receiving recognition from Dzanc Books, Gulf Coast, and Puerto del Sol. Her work is available online at zyzzyva Magazine, where she is a staff writer, as well as at Michigan Quarterly Review: Mixtape, The Margins, The Drift, Common Forms, The Adroit Journal, and The Rumpus, where she reads poetry. She is a journalism mentor at Prison Journalism Project.
She runs the experimental press Doll Hair with her partner Tim Tran and is revisiting piano days.
Photo by Tim Tran
Masters in the Humanities
2019
The University of California, Berkeley
BA English (Minor Creative Writing)
2018
Beijing University
(3 months)
Essay Coach
2025 - Present
Research Assistant
University of California, Santa Cruz
2023
Christopher T. Fan
Research Assistant
University of California, Irvine
2020 - 2021
Sophie Volpp
Research Assistant
University of California, Berkeley
2017
Bathers Library Mini Mag
California Magazine
Common Forms
Copytext Magazine
Denver Quarterly
Doll Hair
Hyphen Magazine
I Have That on Vinyl
UC Berkeley Letters & Science
Irrelevant Press
Jaded Ibis Press: Scarlet, A Literary Journal
La Piccioletta Barca
Mande: A Journal of Bipolar Talent
(upcoming) Memwa Magazine
Michigan Quarterly Review: MQR
Sine Theta Magazine
(upcoming) The Adroit Journal
The Annex
The Daily Californian
The Drift
The Frida Cinema
The Orange County Register
The Rumpus
UChicago Arts
UChicago News
Whale Road Review
(upcoming) zyzzyva
Reading
Prelinger Library
2026
The Shelter
Reading
Light Jacket Series
2026
Mythos in Time, ii
Group Show, Cohorts Season One
Bathers Library
2026
Cotton Candy
Group Show, On-Line Annex
Black Box Gallery
2025
The Shelter (excerpt)
Literary Artist
Kearny Street Workshop APAture: (Un)Becoming
2025
林/Lean (Tree Interlude)
Solo Exhibition
The Crown: Royal Coffee Lab & Tasting Room
2025
Doll Hair
Exhibitor, Chinese Culture Center
Chinatown Ross Alley Zine Festival
2024
“Halcyon” from Unsaid (Doll Hair 2024)
Literary Artist
Kearny Street Workshop APAture: RETURN
2024
Haptic
Group Show, SHIM/Photo
Superfine! Art Fair, DC
Armstrong Gallery, CT
Aqua Art Miami, FL
United Film Lab Network, NY
2023 - 2024
Flowering Sea
Group Show, On-Line Annex
Black Box Gallery
2023
MONONOKE
Group Show, Blick Art Show
The Frida Cinema
2023
Creative-in-residence
2025 - 2026
Kala Art Institute
Artist-in-residence
2025 - 2026
Off Assignment
Scholarship award
2025 - 2026
School for Poetic Computation
Scholarship award
2025
Kearny Street Workshop Interdisciplinary Writers Lab
Scholarship award
2025
PLAYA Summer Lake
Fully-funded residency
2025
Winslow House Project
Fully-funded residency
2025
Prelinger Library
Artist-in-residence, $1,000 grant
2025
Left Margin LIT
Scholarship award
2025
Vermont Studio Center
Fully-funded residency
2025
“Halcyon”
Runner-up
Gulf Coast Barthelme Prize for Short Fiction
2025
Arrhythmia
Longlisted
Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction
2024
“Exhalations”
Finalist
Puerto del Sol Prose Contest
2024
“Two Poems in the Ruin Style [sic]”
Nominated for Best New Poets
2025
“Rosemary Folk”
Nominated for PEN Dau Prize
2023
Staff Writer
2022 - Present
The Rumpus
Poetry Reader
2024 - Present
Prison Journalism Project
Journalism Mentor
2024 - Present
Kearny Street Workshop
Festival Mentee
2025
Quiet Lightning
Graphics Volunteer
2024 - 2025
Chinese Culture Center
Gallery Volunteer
2024
The Frida Cinema
Blog Team Member
2022 - 2024
Red Hen Press
Production Intern
2023
Assignment01
Founder
2022 - 2023
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
K-12 Talk Education Blog Intern
2020
WHPK 88.5FM
Radio DJ
2019
Updated 26.04.02
Photo by Tim Tran
In early 2023, I drove to Placerville, CA to start writing a novel about a countryside that I was experiencing firsthand while living in my car.
This manuscript, The Shelter, is about the Chinese American consultant Adeline’s disappearance into a small town. Her mother’s psychosis leads her to question the teachings of the syncretic religious cult she was raised in, as well as its outsized influence over her parents’ former marriage and her own relationship to God. Adeline’s escapist misadventure reveals dark truths about the classist attitudes that brought her to the town in the first place. In place of her past, however, arise visions of striking pastoral beauty, and a closeness of relationships that challenge her assumptions about the country.
The Shelter balances a rural community’s response to homelessness with a close examination of white terror and anti-Chinese sentiment in the American program of nation-making.
Rowland Heights, CA 2024
Arrhythmia examines my academic life as a graduate student struggling with a mental illness diagnosis at the University of Chicago. Structured after a Choose Your Own Adventure and inspired by the frame narrative of If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino, Arrhythmia's short stories unfold like a Russian nesting doll, with each past materializing within the next. As I make a grab for what I dropped in Berkeley’s student housing co-operatives, I embark on a mental journey to the great Sixties, falling into Casa Zimbabwe and Kingman Hall’s storied histories of madness and mayhem. In striated narratives, I romp around Outer Los Angeles suburbia and from there dig a tunnel to the Cheongsam Hostel in Old Beijing, finding myself—and my peace of mind—along the side of the road.
Advised by Augustus Rose, Darrel Chia — The University of Chicago
2019
Cat Logic is a tale of youthful disregard set in the long cast shadow of the Berkeley housing co-ops. George hails from a hamlet in rural Northern California, and cyclically goes against the grain of generic campus living, finding himself maladjusted to the hardness of the city. An aspiring playwright, he indulges in spinning fanciful stories around the gathered deer of the city, dutifully logging their bad encounters with environmental toxicity and harmful pollutants. When George encounters his classmate Jacqueline while chasing deer in the vastness of the wooded glen behind campus, they begin to madly compose stories for each other about the animals' mystical appearances, using them as a magical portal through which to overcome their surface differences. This unifying thread of closeness keeps the obsessed pair attempting to narrativize the other's existence, and grasping for control of their shared main narrative. As they desperately reach out towards a semblance of sanity, unbeknownst to the two, their growing overreliance on a substance-powered approach to storytelling begins to renege upon the animals' sacred wood, making an environmental fable of their strange connection.
2024
When my cat, Bunny, died of a seizure, I wanted a way to preserve her image. She had helped me escape my loneliness during Chicago’s imitation of fall, my hand deep in her snowy fur, its black and orange tufts akin to monarch wings, shards fragmenting her small back. Fuzzy with sleep, I would awaken to her chewing the ends of my hair. From my studio by Lake Michigan, I watched as the drifts fell down unceasingly, thick piles atop cars, as though the entire world were on tilt. We were no more than shades in the cold daylight. Every evening, I would write, the words blurring together, her accompanying me like a sentinel.
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Petrichor (Doll Hair 2024)
The ringback tone for the photography lab and the mental hospital were one and the same. Two places you had dwelled—belonging to, two. Her. Saving your mother from ocean death. Saving, Heidegger said, meaning only to set her free into her own presencing. She was once all your shelter. Dependencies. Extrication. Flight. The pilotess of a balsa wood model, nosediving into the bonfire pits exuding firelight over the dunes.
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I started seeing deer, really seeing them, in the summer, around the fog and Japanese maples behind the university.
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